The American Soldier

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's (The Marriage of Maria Braun) version of the American gangster film, appropriately shot in black and white, opens with a lengthy poker playing sequence in a low lit smoke-filled room. The episode is reasonably faithful noir until the camera suddenly reveals that the boys are playing with a deck of pornographic cards. Karl Scheydt stars as Ricky, a German-born gangster who comes home to Munich to perform a series of hits apparently commissioned by crooked police officers (plot is secondary to character). Ricky moves through a Hammett/Chandler/Bogart landscape equally comprised of homage and cliche--he dresses spiffy, wears a fedora hat, drinks Ballantine straight up, and shoots with cold precision and even colder emotion. When Ricky visits his mother and brother, the film becomes slightly surreal, as the brother (picture a homosexual Peter Lorre) alternately fawns over Ricky and plays pinball on the machine in the foyer; mom, Ricky, and brother drinking whiskey like it's soda pop throughout the visit. This brief scene sets up the protracted ending (a single shot which lasts several minutes) which some will consider art, and most will use as an opportunity to see if their fast-forward function is still working properly. Libraries with larger foreign collections may want to add this earlier and lesser Fassbinder; for others it's not a necessary purchase. (R. Pitman)